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Publish the Obsidian vault's Knowledge folder as /knowledge (881 notes, 67 folders), with a Knowledge item in the nav and footer. - scripts/import_knowledge.py regenerates data/knowledge from the vault: slugged paths, folder notes as index pages, wikilinks resolved to site links (or plain text), callouts, highlights, and Dataview tables rendered statically. Personal notes are withheld via an exclusion list plus a privacy guard. - tuftecms/core/knowledge.py builds a concept index from note titles and aliases. First mentions on ordinary pages link to their Knowledge note (capped, never in headings, code, links, or sidenotes); Knowledge pages list related notes and where they're mentioned across the site; other pages get a Related Knowledge block. - Knowledge URLs join sitemap.xml (so the sweep test covers them), never displace existing legacy slugs, list alphabetically, and mermaid diagrams render client-side only on pages that have them.
46 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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description: Avarice does not love money. It fears the future, and hires money to
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stand guard.
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source: obsidian-knowledge
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---
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# Greed
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> *Avarice does not love money. It fears the future, and hires money to stand guard.*
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---
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## The Tradition
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Avarice (*philargyria*, love of silver) was third on Evagrius's list of eight thoughts, and his portrait of it is startlingly psychological: the thought whispers of a long old age, sickness to come, famines that might arrive, the shame of dependence — and proposes hoarding as the answer. Gregory the Great kept it among the seven as *avaritia* and gave it a large family of daughter-sins: treachery, fraud, restlessness, violence, hardness of heart. Paul's line that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil kept it near the top of every medieval ranking.
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## The Disordered Desire
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Beneath greed is the entirely reasonable desire for security, bent into the conviction that enough does not exist. Evagrius saw it clearly: avarice is fear wearing a ledger. It is not really about gold — it hoards money, time, knowledge, energy, whatever can be stockpiled against a future that feels like a threat. The miser's tragedy is that the hoard never delivers; the sense of scarcity is internal, so no external quantity closes it. And because everything clutched must be guarded, greed contracts the whole person around the vault — the open hand becomes anatomically impossible.
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## In Purgatorio
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Dante's fifth terrace holds the avaricious — and, in the same penance, the prodigal, since squandering and hoarding are two failures of the same measure. They lie face-down in the dust, bound hand and foot, weeping: having loved earthly goods above the heavens, they now cleave to the earth itself, unable to look up. It is here that the mountain quakes for the liberation of the poet Statius, and here Pope Adrian V explains the penance in a line of perfect economy: what avarice did to the soul, the terrace does to the body.
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## The Remedy
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The counter-practice is [Charity](/knowledge/virtues-and-vices/virtues/charity) — the open hand as discipline. Giving is the one act avarice cannot metabolize, because it treats the future as trustworthy and the neighbor as kin rather than competitor. The tradition prescribed almsgiving less for the receiver's sake than for the giver's release.
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## The Enneagram Passion
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In the [Enneagram](/knowledge/enneagram), avarice is the passion of [Type 5](/knowledge/enneagram/type-5-the-investigator) — hoarding transposed from gold to the inner life. The Five stockpiles knowledge, energy, privacy, and competence against a world that feels depleting, withholding the self the way a miser withholds coin. It is Evagrius's diagnosis exactly: scarcity-fear, managing the future by contraction.
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---
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## Related
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- [Charity](/knowledge/virtues-and-vices/virtues/charity) — the remedy
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- [Seven Deadly Sins](/knowledge/virtues-and-vices/seven-deadly-sins) — the full catalogue
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- [Type 5 - The Investigator](/knowledge/enneagram/type-5-the-investigator) — avarice as passion
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- [Sloth](/knowledge/virtues-and-vices/seven-deadly-sins/sloth) — the terrace below
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- [Gluttony](/knowledge/virtues-and-vices/seven-deadly-sins/gluttony) — the terrace above
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---
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*Face-down in the dust, the hoarders finally hold everything they loved.*
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